Posts tagged Eu

Think regional locks on movie streaming and other digital goods are silly? So does the European Commission. It's outlining a new strategy (the Digital Single Market) that would prevent companies from geo-blocking online services when it's not truly necessary. This kind of arbitrary limit "cannot e...

Ever since a drunk intelligence officer crashed a drone on the White House lawn, questions have been raised about their safety and how such "accidents" can be avoided in the future. Drone makers have already introduced measures to restrict drone flights in certain areas, but over in Europe, the Ho...

Three years ago Google merged more than 60 privacy policies into one gargantuan document, in the hope it would be simpler and more readable for its customers around the world. Some people were skeptical of the changes and, despite Google's best efforts to explain itself, the company was pulled int...

If you've played City of Steam in the EU and thought to yourself, "Man, there are just too many servers for this game right now," the developers agree with you, which is why the server list is being consolidated down to a single server as of December 22nd. Characters will be automatically transferr...

Earlier this week, there were reports that the European Parliament would recommend that Google search be split off from other parts of the business. Today, the Parliament has passed a vote the effectively confirms that intention. More specifically, the vote states "The online search market is of p...

Symantec said that the recently detailed Regin spyware looked like it was created for government surveillance, and there's now some strong support for that claim. Both Kaspersky Lab and Wired understand that the super-sophisticated malware was used to infiltrate both Belgian carrier Belgacom and c...

Google's been caught up in an antitrust tango with the European Union for years, and since the EU hasn't been thrilled with the search giant's attempted concessions, there might be an extreme new option on the table. According to a report from the Financial Times, the European Parliament is expect...

Update 8:55 p.m. PST:
North American realms are now going down at 5 a.m. PST and will be offline for an unscheduled 4 hour maintenance window.
Original Post at 8:44 p.m. PST:
Only announced within the last few minutes, European realms will be going down imminently for an unscheduled 4 h...

Apple and other tech giants had better not lean too heavily on Ireland's super-favorable tax environment; at least one big perk is going away. Finance minister Michael Noonan has detailed a new budget that, among other things, will phase out the "double Irish" system that let companies operating i...

It's no secret that plenty of people are using (and abusing) the European Union's "right to be forgotten" online, but have you wondered just how these requests tend to break down? You won't have to wonder for much longer. Google has updated its Transparency Report with a new section for European s...

Remember those two European satellites that went spectacularly off-course in August? Well, it turns out that the reason the vessels entered into the wrong orbit was due to frozen fuel lines. Space Travel reports that pipes containing the Russian Soyuz rocket's (which put the satellites into space)...

After setting Apple firmly in its crosshairs, the European Commission is now targeting retail giant Amazon's tax dealings. In a press release this morning, the Commission announced it's opened an "in-depth investigation" into the company's tax status in the tiny country of Luxembourg -- home to Am...

US regulators may have given Facebook's $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp the thumbs-up some time ago, but the social network was still waiting for the EU to do the same. Now, thankfully, approval has been handed down from European Commissioner Joaquin Almunia, who says that, thanks to the prese...

An EU commission has accused Ireland of granting "state aid" tax breaks to Apple that may break market rules. That was the result of an investigation by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) over Irish deals brokered in 1991 and 2007. It has now asked Ireland to provide ...

Those of you who remember the distant and far-off past of 2013 may recall that Dragon's Prophet launched last year. Those of you still playing the game a year later are probably very aware of that anniversary. The game launched on September 18th in Europe and September 23rd in the US, so there's st...

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has ruled that libraries have the right to digitize books and distribute them to dedicated reading terminals without first obtaining the publisher's permission. The decision rests on exceptions built into the EU Copyright Directive for reproducing ...

A few months back, it looked like that Google was set to avoid fines from the European Commission stemming from a multi-year probe into the outfit burying rival ads in search results. With new "arguments and data," the competition said it isn't satisfied with those concessions, and Reuters reports...

Arianespace, the company that launches satellites for the European Union, has had to concede that its latest mission hasn't been a complete success. Friday's launch conveyed two satellites, Dorea and Milena, into orbit to help build out Galileo, the EU's homegrown alternative to GPS and GLONASS. E...

Google has previously offered a little bit of insight into how it handles (and occasionally mishandles) the EU's "right to be forgotten" (RTBF) requests, but it has largely been a nebulous process. How do you know whether or not you'll be scrubbed from search results? Well, things just got a littl...

In an era where video games can be sold as "free-to-pay" and/or "freemium" products, it's important to know what "free" really means. A "free" game might actually cost you nothing and generate revenue purely through in-game advertising, or it might be free to download, but in-game purchases can set...